Midnight's Furies Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps

  A Train to Pakistan

  Fury

  Jinnah and Jawaharlal

  Madhouse

  “Pakistan Murdabad!”

  Indian Summer

  Photos

  Off the Rails

  “Stop This Madness”

  Ad Hoc Jihad

  Himalayan Quagmire

  The Last Battle

  Deadly Legacy

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Photo Credits

  Index

  About the Author

  First Mariner Books edition 2016

  Copyright © 2015 by Nisid Hajari

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hajari, Nisid, author.

  Midnight’s furies : the deadly legacy of India’s partition / Nisid Hajari.

  pages ; cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-547-66921-2 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-547-66924-3 (ebook)—ISBN 978-0-544-70549-5 (pbk.)

  1. India—History—Partition, 1947. 2. India-Pakistan Conflict, 1947–1949. 3. Pakistan—History—20th century. 4. Jinnah, Mahomed Ali, 1876–1948. 5. Nehru, Jawaharlal, 1889–1964. I. Title.

  DS480.842.H35 2015

  954.04'2—dc23

  2014034426

  Maps by Glen Pawelski/Mapmaking Specialists, Ltd.

  Cover design by Martha Kennedy

  Cover photograph: Police disperse riots in Calcutta, 1946, © Universal Images Group/SuperStock

  v2.0616

  For my parents

  India Before Partition

  Pakistan After Independence

  Post-Partition: The Zone of Conflict

  PROLOGUE

  A Train to Pakistan

  AHEAD, THE JEEP’S HEADLIGHTS picked out a lonely stretch of railroad track. The driver slowed, then, when still about a third of a mile away, pulled over and waited. All around wan stalks of wheat, shriveled by drought and rust, trembled in the hint of breeze. Two turbaned figures emerged from the gloom, borne by an ungainly, knock-kneed camel.

  At a signal the five broad-shouldered men in the jeep piled out. They carried a strange assortment of objects—a brand-new Eveready car battery, rolls of wire, a pair of metal hooks with cables attached, and three lumpy, unidentifiable packages. Moving quickly, they joined the now-dismounted riders and headed for the copse of trees that lined both sides of the permanent way. When they reached an irrigation canal that ran along the tracks, several of the men slid down its banks and hid.

  Two others dashed forward. Each tucked one of the mysterious parcels against a rail, then carefully attached a wire to the soft gelignite inside and trailed the cable back to where the others crouched. A third man brought the pair of hooks over to a nearby telephone pole and used them to tap into the phone line. As he listened, waiting for word of the Karachi-bound train, his compatriots grimly checked their revolvers.1

  The men were Sikhs, recognizable by their long beards and the turbans enclosing their coils of uncut hair. They had the bearing and burly physique of soldiers—not surprising given that their tiny community had long sent disproportionate numbers of young men to fight in the Indian Army’s storied regiments. In the world war that had just ended two years earlier, Sikhs had made up more than 10 percent of the army even though they represented less than 2 percent of the population.

  The eavesdropper motioned to his comrades: the train was coming. This was no regularly scheduled Lahore Express or Bombay Mail. Onboard every passenger was Muslim. The men, and some of the women, were clerks and officials who had been laboring in the British-run government of India in New Delhi. With them were their families and their ribbon-tied files; their photo albums, toys, china, and prayer rugs; the gold jewelry that represented much of their savings and the equally prized bottles of illicit whiskey many drank despite the strictures of their religion. On 9 August 1947 they were moving en masse to Karachi, 800 miles away, to take part in a great experiment. In six days the sweltering city on the shores of the Arabian Sea would become the capital of the world’s first modern Muslim nation and its fifth largest overall—Pakistan.

  The country would be one of the strangest-looking on the postwar map of the world. One half would encompass the fierce northwestern marches of the Indian subcontinent, from the Khyber Pass down to the desert that fringed Karachi; the other half would include the swampy, typhoon-tossed Bengal delta in the far northeast. In between would lie nearly a thousand miles of independent India, which would, like Pakistan, win its freedom from the British Empire at the stroke of midnight on 15 August.

  The Karachi-bound émigrés were in a celebratory mood. As they pulled out of Delhi, cheers of “Pakistan Zindabad!” (Long live Pakistan!) had drowned out the train’s whistle. Rather than laboring under a political order dominated by the Hindus who made up three-quarters of the subcontinent’s population, they would soon be masters of their own domain. Their new capital, Karachi, had been a sleepy backwater until the war; American GIs stationed there raced wonderingly past colorful camel caravans in their jeeps.2 Now a boomtown fervor had overtaken the city. The streets were a roaring tangle of cranes and scaffolding, and the dust from scores of building projects mixed with drifts of desert sand. If the city could hardly handle the influx of new ­residents—­“the difficulty of putting several hundred quarts into a pint pot is extreme,” Britain’s first ambassador to the new Pakistan remarked—a good-humored camaraderie had so far smoothed over most tensions.3 Ministers perched on packing crates to work as they waited for their furniture to arrive. Their clerks used acacia thorns for lack of paper clips.

  To the Sikhs leaning against the cool earth of the canal bank, this Pakistan seemed a curse. The new frontier would pass by less than 50 miles from this spot, running right down the center of the fertile Punjab—the subcontinent’s breadbasket and home to 5 million of India’s 6 million Sikhs. Nearly half of them would end up on the Muslim side of the line.

  In theory, that should not have mattered. At birth India and Pakistan would have more in common with each other—politically, culturally, economically, and strategically—than with any other nation on the planet. Pakistan sat astride the only land invasion routes into India. Their economies were bound in a thousand ways. Pakistan’s eastern wing controlled three-quarters of the world’s supply of jute, then still in wide use as a fiber; almost all of the jute-processing mills lay on the Indian side of the border. During famine times parts of India had turned hungrily to the surplus grain produced in what was now Pakistan’s western wing.

  The Indian Army, which was to be divided up between the two countries, had trained and fought as one for a century. Top officers—still largely British—refused to look on one another as potential enemies. Just a few nights earlier both Hindu and Muslim soldiers had linked arms and drunkenly belted out the verses of “Auld Lang Syne” at a farewell party in Delhi, swearing undying brotherhood to one another. Cold War strategists imagined Indian and Pakistani battalions standing shoulder to shoulder to defend the subcontinent against Soviet invasion.

  Many of the politicians in Delhi and Karachi, too, had once fought together against the British; they had social and family ties going back decades. They did not intend to militarize the border between them with
pillboxes and rolls of barbed wire. They laughed at the suggestion that Punjabi farmers might one day need visas to cross from one end of the province to the other.

  Pakistan would be a secular, not an Islamic, state, its founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, promised: Hindus and Sikhs would be free to practice their faiths and would be treated equally under the law. India would be better off without two disgruntled corners of the subcontinent, its people were told, less charitably. “Division,” as India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, put it, “is better than a union of unwilling parts.”4 The fight to establish Pakistan had been bitter but astoundingly short—occupying less than ten of the nearly two hundred years of British suzerainty over India. Surely in another decade the wounds inflicted by the struggle would heal.

  The Sikhs tensed as a long, low whistle from the train floated toward them. In the distance, they could see the engine’s headlamp rocking gently through the fields. Their eyes followed its progress until the train rounded a last bend and the spotlight blazed up before them like a miniature sun, bright and blinding. They rose, surging with adrenaline. Seconds later the Pakistan Special’s heavy black engine thudded over the spot where the gelignite charges lay, then its first bogie.

  The Sikh holding the battery gripped the detonator switch he had rigged up to it. When the second passenger car was directly over the improvised mine, he firmly pressed down.

  Nearly seventy years later, Partition has become a byword for horror. Instead of joining hands at their twinned births, India and Pakistan would be engulfed by some of the worst sectarian massacres the modern world has ever seen. Non-Muslims on one side of the new border in the Punjab and Muslims on the other descended with sword and spear and torch on the minorities who lived among them. An appalling slaughter ensued.

  Gangs of killers set whole villages aflame, hacking to death men and children and the aged while carrying off young women to be raped. British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse: pregnant women had their breasts cut off and babies hacked out of their bellies; infants were found literally roasted on spits. Foot caravans of destitute refugees fleeing the violence stretched for 50 miles and more. As the peasants trudged along wearily, mounted guerrillas charged out of the tall crops that lined the road and culled them like sheep. Special refugee trains, filled to bursting when they set out, suffered repeated ambushes along the way. All too often they crossed the border in funereal silence, blood seeping from under their carriage doors.

  Across the Punjab, the limbs of thousands of corpses poked from shallow graves like twigs, gnawed on by wild dogs. Estimates of the dead range widely yet are universally shocking. Not long afterward, one British official, working off casualty reports and his own inquiries, put the number at 200,000.5 Others, claiming to factor in those who had died of disease and hunger and exposure, insist that more than a million perished. At least 14 million refugees were uprooted in what remains the biggest forced migration in history. Western Pakistan was virtually emptied of Hindus and Sikhs; the Indian half of the Punjab lost almost all of its Muslims. The conflagration stands as one of the deadliest and most brutal civil conflicts of the twentieth century, unrivaled in scale until the 1994 massacres in Rwanda.

  Yet like Rwanda, the riots were relatively confined in time and space. The worst killings lasted only about six weeks. While the chaos spread throughout most of western Pakistan and great swathes of northern India, much of the rest of the subcontinent was not directly affected. Today Partition is a horrific memory for millions—but it is just that, a memory.

  What truly continues to haunt today’s world are the furies that were unloosed in 1947—the fears and suspicions and hatreds forged in Partition’s searing crucible. In those few weeks, and the few months that followed, a dangerous psychological chasm would open up between India and Pakistan. Leaders on both sides would suspect their counterparts of winking at genocide. Their mutual mistrust and scheming for advantage quickly brought their infant nations to the brink of war, and then ignited shadow contests for control over the kingdoms of Hyderabad in the south and Kashmir in the north. In less than a year, the Indian and Pakistani armies would confront one another on the battlefield.

  Buffeted by this whirlwind, Pakistan quickly developed a deep-seated paranoia about its larger neighbor. The idea that India might strangle the Muslim state in its cradle seemed entirely plausible. Groaning under a tidal wave of refugees, its economy and bureaucracy near collapse, Pakistan could hardly have resisted. That existential fear has only deepened as the two nations have fought several skirmishes and two more open wars—the last of which, in 1971, broke off Pakistan’s eastern wing to form an independent Bangladesh.

  Today, anxiety about the “India threat” drives the Pakistani state’s most destabilizing behavior, in particular its use of jihadists as tools of state. Since the late 1980s, the Pakistan Army’s ruthless Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) has cultivated several militant groups to bleed the Indians in Kashmir; foremost among them is Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose fighters carried out the bloody 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). ISI support was similarly critical to creating the Taliban movement in the 1990s and to rebuilding it in the 2000s—in both cases, to ensure that Afghanistan did not fall under India’s sway. Some ISI elements may even have protected Osama bin Laden before his death in 2011, counting on the threat from al Qaeda to keep open the gusher of military aid from the United States.

  The nexus of militant groups that now infest the tribal areas along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan—some of them tolerated by the ISI, others dedicated to overthrowing the Pakistani government—has metastasized into a cancer that threatens not just Pakistan but the wider world. Several terror attacks in the West, and several foiled plots, have been traced back to jihadist training camps in the area. Pakistan’s efforts to combat this threat have traditionally been halfhearted, focused mostly on the “bad” militants targeting the Pakistani state rather than “good” militants like Lashkar, who might yet prove useful in any conflict with India.

  As its ultimate deterrent, Pakistan also continues to build the world’s fastest-growing and most opaque nuclear arsenal. Islamabad has refused to sign a no-first-use pledge as India has, and indeed during their last serious conflict in Kashmir’s Kargil region in 1999, there is evidence that Pakistani commanders considered deploying the weapons if Indian forces broke through their lines. An estimated one hundred warheads lie hidden around the country, some reportedly moved around by civilian vehicles to evade detection by the United States, which Pakistanis believe has developed contingency plans to seize them in the event of a crisis. Given the growing reach and brazenness of jihadist groups—whose targets have already included Pakistan Army headquarters and bases believed to house nuclear components—the vulnerability of these weapons is deeply worrying.

  Indeed, in this one crucial sense the subcontinent has become the world’s most dangerous place: the chances of a nuclear weapon falling into the hands of a rogue group, or of an outright nuclear war erupting, are nowhere greater than here. Partition’s legacy is no mere colonial hangover. The unresolved sense of siege Pakistan has suffered since 1947, its fear that India has both the capacity and the desire to snuff out its independent existence, poses one of the greatest threats to the stability and security of today’s world.

  Although the subject of deep and often penetrating scholarship, the experience of Partition remains poorly understood both within and especially outside the subcontinent. On mice-infested library shelves in Delhi and Karachi, lines upon lines of moldering books pick apart the subject: academic histories, biographies, memoirs, collections of official papers, multivolume sets of correspondence, oral histories, poems, political screeds. Most are lamentably unread. Ordinary Indians and Pakistanis long ago settled on their own myopic and mutually contradictory versions of events, which largely focus on blaming the other side or the British for provoking the slaughter.<
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  Meanwhile, the rest of the world barely grasps what happened. Traditional Western accounts center not on Partition itself but on the years of struggle that preceded independence. This is the heroic narrative celebrated in sepia-tinted movies like Gandhi: the tale of how an oppressed, peaceful people faced down an empire with only the strength of their moral convictions. The weeks of bloodshed that followed the transfer of power are treated as a postscript—an inexplicable and probably inescapable bout of madness uncorked by the lifting of British rule.

  More recent histories have sought to capture the human toll of Partition using heartbreaking first-person testimonies. But such stories are necessarily granular and episodic, and often unreliable. In many ways, the rich canon of Partition novels and poems is a better source of insight into the killings themselves.

  This book aims to answer a different question—not why the subcontinent was split, or who was to blame for the massacres, but how the experience of Partition carved out such a wide gulf between India and Pakistan. How did two nations with so much in common end up such inveterate enemies so quickly? Like the debate over what caused World War I, it is a conundrum that defies easy answers. Yet unlike World War I, this wound remains open today, and so the question is an urgent one.

  The facts are not easy to piece together. The snowfall of memos and correspondence churned out by the British Raj more or less ends in August 1947. Early Indian and Pakistani records are thin and scattershot. In the first weeks and months after independence, chaos brought whole departments to a standstill. Rumor and hearsay infected even official reports. What files do exist often remain closed to researchers.

  After more than a year in the archives in New Delhi, London, and Washington, D.C., I have attempted to reconstruct a narrative of events using a sort of demi-official record of the period: notes, letters, and diaries of politicians and military commanders; army sitreps; economic data; the reports of informants and freelance spies; embassy gossip. What these sources lack in clarity they make up for in urgency: one sees sharply how sleepless nights, bad advice, and geopolitical fantasies clouded decision-making on both sides of the new frontier.